Hailed as a Renais­sance man, Paul Block, Jr., the late co-pub­lisher of The Blade, was hon­ored Wed­nes­day night dur­ing a Univer­sity of Toledo lec­ture se­ries for his con­tri­bu­tions to sci­ence and jour­nal­ism, and for his role as a civic leader.

Mr. Block’s life was the sub­ject of the fourth an­nual S. Am­jad Hus­sain vis­it­ing lec­ture in the his­tory of med­i­cine and sur­gery, a se­ries con­ducted by the Univer­sity of Toledo’s col­lege of med­i­cine and life sci­ences.

The lec­ture was held in the col­lege’s Health Ed­u­ca­tion Build­ing, which is con­nected to the Paul Block, Jr., Health Science Build­ing.

Mr. Man­ning, a na­tive of Ire­land and an early fac­ulty mem­ber at MCO, now the Univer­sity of Toledo Med­i­cal Center, de­tailed some of Mr. Block’s ma­jor ac­com­plish­ments in his var­ied fields of in­ter­est. The pair were also long­time friends, and Mr. Man­ning de­scribed Mr. Block as mod­est, gen­tle, and a man with a “won­der­ful sense of hu­mor.”

“I ad­mired him as a per­son, a chem­ist, and as a civic leader,” he said.

Born in 1911, Mr. Block was a man who very much cared about Toledo, Mr. Man­ning said, ev­i­denced by the 1945 proj­ect “Toledo To­mor­row,” a view of the city 50 years in the fu­ture that was funded with $500,000 by The Blade. Thou­sands viewed the ex­hibit at the Toledo Zoo, and the proj­ect led to, among other things, the city’s Metroparks sys­tem and Toledo Ex­press Air­port.

Mr. Block was the driv­ing force in the de­vel­op­ment of the Med­i­cal Col­lege of Ohio, which opened in 1969 and merged with the Univer­sity of Toledo in 2006. Through the news­pa­per and pri­vate con­tact with pol­i­ti­cians, he convinced the state to place a med­i­cal col­lege in north­west Ohio and not else­where in the state.

The late Mr. Block was named to MCO’s board af­ter the med­i­cal school was es­tab­lished in 1964, and mem­bers elected him chair­man.

The school was Mr. Block’s first love among all his proj­ects, Mr. Man­ning said.

Maybe less known, Mr. Man­ning said, is that Mr. Block was a “vir­tu­oso chem­ist” who pub­lished 20 peer-re­viewed sci­en­tific pa­pers and was a Na­tional In­sti­tutes of Health grantee. Mr. Block even had his own pri­vate lab next to his house for more than 30 years, where he con­ducted much of his re­search.

Mr. Block re­ceived a PhD in or­ganic chem­is­try from Co­lum­bia Univer­sity in New York City in 1943, and played a key role in the field of thy­roid re­search, dis­cov­er­ing that io­dine was not es­sen­tial for thy­roid com­pounds.

He syn­the­sized a com­pound that had no io­dine or other hal­o­gen, in re­search that was pub­lished in 1973 in the Jour­nal of Me­dic­i­nal Chem­is­try. Mr. Man­ning called the dis­cov­ery a rev­o­lu­tion­ary find­ing, and said Mr. Block’s work has been used ex­ten­sively in re­search and could have po­ten­tial ther­a­peu­tic uses.

All of this work came while Mr. Block was co-pub­lisher of The Blade from 1942 to 1987, when he died at the age of 75. He was a cham­pion of civil rights and a sup­porter of the arts and cul­ture in Toledo.

Al­lan Block, chair­man of The Blade’s par­ent com­pany, Block Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc., said the trib­ute to his father by Mr. Man­ning was out­stand­ing and well-re­searched. He said he was de­lighted that turn­out for the event was so strong, and that at­tend­ees could learn about his father’s many ac­com­plish­ments.

“I don’t think my father de­serves to just be a strange name on a build­ing who no one knew ex­isted,” he said. “He de­serves to be re­mem­bered.”

UT Pres­i­dent Lloyd Ja­cobs said many are un­aware of how ground­break­ing Mr. Block’s chem­is­try work was; he said Mr. Block’s dis­cov­ery helped shape mod­ern bio­chem­is­try. The uni­ver­sity’s Health Science Cam­pus tries to carry on Mr. Block’s mul­ti­plic­ity, by of­fer­ing health care to res­i­dents, teach­ing doc­tors, and by be­ing a leader in the com­mu­nity. “[Mr. Block’s] pur­suit of ex­cel­lence is what I think we cel­e­brate ev­ery day around here,” Dr. Ja­cobs said.

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